About the role:
What will you do?
- Lead, mentor and grow a team of engineers (4 engineers, mostly senior), and lead the recruitment and build-out of a second team. Manage one of Hippo's top strategic engineering spaces – Hippo Plus – end‑to‑end, from technical direction to delivery.
- Introduce structure, processes, and good engineering practices.
- Collaborate with talented Product Managers to manage the team’s project roadmap, clarifying requirements, and ensuring a balance of technical excellence, agility, and user benefit.
- Partner closely with business stakeholders to translate business needs into engineering priorities.
- Balance new feature development with the operational needs of a fast-scaling, still-validating product
- Show strong technical leadership with a data‑driven mindset, focusing on excellent execution and high‑quality software, and ensuring the team delivers real business value – not just features.
- Coordinate with teams in our global locations across the US, Brazil and Poland.
We might be a match if you…
- Have a strong software engineering background – you don't need to code daily, but you need to understand what's happening under the hood well enough to mentor and push back when needed
- Have led a technical team before, ideally during a product's scaling stage
- Have experience working with and leading distributed, remote teams across time zones
- Appreciate Product as a true partner and co-owner of software products
- Maintain a relentless focus on end-users, creating customer-centric solutions
- Have a proven ability to build teams, develop individuals, and influence cross-functional teams and senior management
- Are comfortable with ambiguity – this is a new venture, still figuring things out, and priorities can shift
- Are product-minded and enjoy being close to the business side, not just the codebase
- Have a high level of technical proficiency with some of Hippo's tech stack, including JavaScript/Node.js and React
- Have a great command of English (both written & spoken) and Polish at least on a communicative level.
- Are available in the afternoons – we prioritize everyone's personal time and work-life fit, but since we work in multinational teams, evening meetings may be necessary to ensure smooth communication across time zones
Nice to have:
- Experience in a startup-like environment
- Experience building a team from scratch
- Experience working in a SOC2-compliant environment